Fakecharities.org

Chris Mounsey of the Libertarian Party is registered as the owner of the domain name Fakecharities.org.[1] It claims to monitor and expose charities as 'fake', which the website defines as 'any organisation registered as a charity with the Charity Commission that derives more than 10% of its income, or which receives more than £1 million, from the state.'[2] The site contains no details on who or what it is run or funded by.

The original idea came from a post I made last year on the Devil's Kitchen blog about Action on Smoking and Health.

Adding:

The Department of Health had opened a consultation on banning tobacco displays that invited responses only from organisations it had contracts with. We quickly realised that, wherever we looked when legislation was being proposed, the same thing was happening. So we decided to do something about it.[4]

Simon Clark of Tobacco industry front group FOREST, has offered readers of his blog the opportunity to submit charities for investigation via his website [5]

Criticism

Helen Barrett from Third Sector argues that the 10 per cent criterion is 'dubious' adding 'I can't think of a single international development NGO that gets less than half of its income from government - should they really be labelled 'fake' charities?'.[4]